The Future of Minecraft

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From the Adventure Update to the Xbox 360 version, the latest info.

By Charles Onyett

With its sales numbers still climbing, Minecraft is set to expand far beyond the confines of its PC home. At E3 2011 Microsoft announced an Xbox 360 version, and earlier this year we learned about in-development iOS and Android versions of Mojang's sandbox construction / survival / farming / player-versus-player / sheep-shearing video game.

To catch up on everything that's been going on with Minecraft, we asked its creator, Markus 'Notch' Persson, a whole bunch of questions via email. Here's what he said.

IGN: You're nearing three million sales at this point for Minecraft – what do you think contributes so much to the game's success? The design? The distribution model? A combination of the two, or something else?

Markus Persson: Oh, there are many factors. I've tried to analyze this so many times.

Back when Minecraft started, the PC download market was just starting to take off, and Minecraft fit perfectly into the climate. Getting the game out to customers very early meant I never had to develop the game in the dark, and players who liked the game could start talking about the game to their friends very early on. Once the fan base grew large enough on various forums and on YouTube, the game really started taking off.

Since we're continuously developing the game while selling it, we constantly have a new opportunity to sell the game to people who may have tried it and decided not to buy it yet. Listening to what the community wants and communicating with people as transparently as possible makes people feel involved in the game. And that's good.

And of course, I also like to think the game itself is pretty good, and it has the advantage of not being part of an over-saturated genre.

IGN: When did you first realize the product was about to break through into massive popularity? Was there a single event? A YouTube video? Or is there no way to clearly identify what it might have been?

Markus Persson: Sales started climbing early last year once the fan base was large enough and the game was getting fun enough. Last summer, sales were very high for a one-man project, but still slowly climbing, and I realized the game was getting too big for me to just do it on my own. There are several milestone events that stand out in my mind, like getting an email from Peter Molyneux about how much he likes the game, and getting a big mention on the Team Fortress blog, but there was no individual breakthrough.. it was much more organic than that.

IGN: When starting out on Minecraft, what was your vision for the game? How has the growing user base affected what you initially wanted to do with it, if at all? How important has the mod community been in determining the direction of development?

Markus Persson: The absolutely first iteration of what later became Minecraft was a top-down isometric game inspired by Dwarf Fortress. Once it switched over to first person, I fairly quickly came up with the concept of a game very similar to what Minecraft is like now. I try very hard to stick to my idea of making a game for myself, while still combining that with listening to the community. Sometimes they're just plain right, like when they finally convinced me to add ladders to the game.

As for the modding community, it's made me realize that Minecraft can be a bigger - or at least different game - from my own ideas. It's not really just my game any more. As a direct result of the great mods out there, we're working on an extremely extensive modding support that will let people do pretty much everything they want with the game. I still want to make the game I initially set out to do, though, so I try not to let mods affect the core game too much.

Jens [Bergensten from Mojang] is more open to integrating mods, however. Every once in a while he convinces me that some mod is just too good not to add, and thus we've ended up with stuff like the smoother lighting, pistons, a more compact saving format and a few things more.

I think the dynamic between us two is very good for the game.

IGN: How do you go about making sure Minecraft doesn't become an overwhelmingly complicated experience for a newcomer, especially as more and more features are added moving toward launch? How do you maintain the element of fun in a game that's all about freedom?

Markus Persson: This boils down to plain old game design. The more complex things in the game shouldn't be the first things you encounter in the game. As it's now, the first thing you do is dig into the ground and perhaps punch a tree. Other than the crafting, there's nothing really complicated being presented to the player until he or she chooses to start doing it. We try to keep the game in a way where as few new features as possible are mandatory, but the player can choose which features to play around with.

One big challenge is how we present all these options the player. The achivements was our little attempt to bootstrap the gameplay experience, but at the moment, I almost feel like we don't have to anything. The community is so strong, and there are much better resources out there explaining how to play the game than anything we could ever do ourselves.

IGN: Was a console version on your mind at all when starting out with the game? At what point in development did that conversation start up?

Markus Persson: No, the idea of a console port didn't come up until fairly late in the project. If I had intended for Minecraft to end up on consoles, I wouldn't have developed the game in Java. The decision to port the game to consoles came from a combination of player requests, a desire to play around with the brand on different platforms, and some interesting business deals. Thankfully, I didn't personally have to be involved with any of the business talks, some of the first people we hired was a business developer and a CEO, and they both do a great job taking care of all of that.

IGN: I have to imagine Microsoft wasn't the only company that approached you. Are you able to mention any other companies you've been in talks with, and what was discussed at the meetings?

Markus Persson: Almost all of the big companies talked to us. I wasn't involved in the actual talks myself, so I'm not sure what was said, but one major point for us was for us to keep our culture and to be able to make games in the way we want to make games, where we can release games fairly early and keep iterating on them based of community feedback for a long time.

IGN: For Minecraft on Xbox 360, are you able to say how it will differ from the PC version? Will there be multiplayer and what are the Xbox 360 / PC cross-platform features? How do you handle the updates that are so often issued for the PC version – do they need to go through Microsoft certification before being pushed live? Will that affect the frequency and content of the updates? How might the Kinect controls work?

Markus Persson: I find myself in a strange situation here! There's going to actual marketing for the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft, so I've agreed to be slightly less transparent than usual when it comes to that version, so now I basically have no idea what I can and what I can't say..

But..

The 360 version with be a new product based of the PC version of Minecraft. It will be designed to work better on a console and to focus on the types of experiences you expect when playing games on a game console. As an example of something that will change, the crafting needs to be done completely different. The current type of crafting with a game controller would be about as fun as name-entry is.

I don't dare answer any more of the questions, other than to say that I'm trying very hard to make sure we have a setting you can turn on that turns the game into what everyone is joking about; you wave your arms around to mine and use items. It's just too silly not to include. Punching trees from the comfort of your living room has never been this immersive before.

IGN: Is the Xbox 360 exclusivity a timed exclusive? Is there any chance Minecraft might show up on PlayStation 3 in the future, or Nintendo's Wii U?

Markus Persson: I have been instructed not to reply to this question, so here's a picture of a sheep instead: